Global Agricultural Company: Multicloud Application Ecosystem

Cloud application solution provides a worldwide agricultural company with vital data analytics to meet business objectives and gain a competitive advantage in the industry

MAINTAINING A COMPETITIVE EDGE

Organizations must develop and market their products or services to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers.

A Global Agricultural Company was faced with trying to manage and analyze overwhelming amounts of data to gain valuable insights that would guide their business strategy. They were looking for a way to adopt deeper analytics capabilities that would identify customer patterns and trends – resulting in decisions that would enable innovative business outcomes.

Specifically, their objective was to find a programmatic way to help sales individuals highlight and direct their selling efforts and create a shift in both sales and marketing efforts to obtain the highest business impact.

The company needed development teams that could build applications of high quality, as well as provide a solution for how to scale systems in the cloud, how to maintain them and how to deliver generic applications that can be reused. Without a system in place to manage their data, the company feared they would fall behind.

Implementing an IT solution on their own would be extremely challenging. The data possessed differing levels of complexity and the organization lacked sufficient resources in their local data center to manage that complexity.

EMPOWERING DATA ACROSS ALL BUSINESS GROUPS

To solve for their data needs, development teams from WWT implemented a multicloud application ecosystem within the Agricultural Company that focused on providing and analyzing large amounts of historic and current data.

WWT teams knew they needed to create a multifunctional solution to fit the organization’s needs and developed three distinct projects to implement this goal. Each project revolved around a vital area of their business – external customers, internal personnel/sales and product data – and utilized the public cloud providers Google Cloud Platform and AWS.

While each project had a particular focus area, all had one element in common: a cloud application ecosystem. WWT development teams produced cloud-based applications for each separate business area. These development teams focused on moving data out of legacy or source systems such as Salesforce, Oracle or SAP and providing that data in a way that drives business value.

All teams focused on highly scalable application programming interfaces (APIs) and streaming systems that provide near real-time updates. This is critical to deriving insights from their data and gives the Agricultural Company an understanding of both internal and external needs, as well as product data.

The solution needed to align with the practices of several teams, including IT security, the API platform group, Kafka management, cloud operations, data stewardship, application development and IT leadership. To achieve this clarity, WWT developers met with each group when a new major applicationfunctionality was being developed to ensure that all concerns and policies were addressed.

USING DATA ANALYTICS TO MEET EVOLVING NEEDS

After implementing a multicloud application ecosystem, the Agricultural Company now has data assets they need to meet changing business needs. This enhanced the effectiveness of selling and optimized resources, improving not only the functionality of internal sales and marketing efforts, but the overall experience with end customers as well.

Their customers are seeing an ever-growing presence of advanced technology features that they can utilize for their own benefit. For instance, they can be advised on the best product to use in their specific location, track invoiced orders throughout the process, easily access the dealer network and apply for financing online.

WWT’s cloud application solution allowed the Agricultural Company to better use their data in a way that is both beneficial to them and their customers – achieving their overarching goal of gaining a competitive advantage in the market.